


Magic's Price

by DCW



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, Arthur comes back, Dark Merlin, Fix-It, Gen, Lots of one-sided romance going on here, M/M, Not Happy, Post-Canon, Sort Of, You've been warned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-18 20:08:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13107621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DCW/pseuds/DCW
Summary: There is always a price, with magic.





	Magic's Price

**Author's Note:**

> Revised and reposted after I orphaned my last account.  
> Please let me know if you'd like to see a sequel.

He finds the horses after an hour of walking, but he can’t bring himself to be grateful for it.  
He know that half of himself has been left behind, and even if that other half is destined to rise again – it still hurts. He feels empty, pathetic. He wasn’t strong enough, if he had been stronger then maybe he would have been able to save Arthur in time.  
-  
Gwen rushes to him when he enters the citadel, his face carefully blank. He almost falls off his horse and into her arms. Though no tears are shed he knows that the both of them are going half-crazy with grief. He feels a flicker of gladness in his chest, at least he’s not alone in this.  
_No man is worth your tears, Merlin_  
The words echo in his mind, and his heart tightens just a little more.  
-  
He leaves a few days before Gwen’s coronation, without a word to anyone. With cover of night he takes Arthur’s horse from the stable and rides north and rides and rides and rides until he comes to an unknown place – it’s dark, grey, and covered in a layer of snow. The people there are similar to him, all with gaunt expressions and empty eyes, it’s a good a place as any to hide and study.  
He spends nine years there, under the disguise of an old, widowed, hermit. He uses what Gaius taught him, to help and heal whomever he can. (His own wounds remain the same, open and unhealing)  
He also uses his magic freely, and although his heart is cold his mind is glad to no have to hide.  
-  
At night he dreams of soft, cream-colored skin running along his. Soft but strong hands caressing him an bringing him a pleasure that makes his eyes roll back and unfamiliar sounds escape his mouth.  
He wakes, warm yet cold, his insides twisting with disgust at his own weakness.  
-  
One day, in a flurry of gold-embroidery and red, the Knights of Camelot arrive for him.  
-  
Her name is Annabeth Pendragon, and though she has her mother's coffee-coloured skin and tangled mess of dark curls – the first thing Merlin notices is Arthur’s eyes staring up at him out of her face.  
He stares at her, awestruck, and she stares back at him. After a moment that seems to take an eternity, she smiles. A tiny glimmer of gold shines beneath the blue.  
-  
“The moment she started showing signs we knew we had to find you,” Leon explain to him awhile later, sitting at the desk across from him in what used to be Arthur’s room.  
He and Gwen had married three years after he’d left, and now had two children of their own.  
“It is said that you are the greatest sorcerer to ever live, and there is no one else we trust with teaching her.”  
What a cruel coincidence that Arthur’s first and only child would be born with magic.  
-  
Annabeth is nine when they first meet, and Merlin watches her grow into a woman as proud as her father and as strong as her mother. He adores her, so much. When he’s with her he is almost happy enough to ignore the gaping hole in his chest…  
Twenty years later, when she comes barreling into his room wide-eyed and looking no older than thirteen, he realizes how special she really is.  
The wound in his chest is filled a little at this, a little glad – because at least no he has someone to wait with.  
-  
Merlin watches his friends grow old and pass into Albion. He grows old too, but he can feel the magic under his skin and know that if he lets his growing go on for too long his unruly power would just force him to become young again.  
So he stays just old enough, no older than fourty, with a few lines on his face and streaks of silver running through his hair.  
Annabeth holds his hand through it all, capable and confident in her abilities.  
She chooses to remain younger, “otherwise people will mistake me for your wife,” she tells him with a smile.  
-  
After a hundred years the monarchy in Camelot is no more, when Gwen and Leon’s grandchildren decided that the people have just as much of a right to rule as they do.  
He asks Anna if she’d rather stay, to grow young , take a husband, have a family…  
She regards him for a moment, takes his hand, and tells him that she’ll go and tell the servants to ready the horses for them.  
-  
Together they travel to distant lands, seeing different countries and people that had never been recorded in any book back in Camelot.  
He and Annabeth play a variety of different roles, from father and daughter, mother and son brother and sister (he still doesn’t know how any believed them with that one), and husband and wife.  
Merlin waits to hear, but Albion remains silent.  
-  
He ignores the soft look in Annabeth’s eyes whenever she looks at him, the tender way she brushes against him, or draws close to him when they share a bed.  
His heart still longs for his king.  
-  
Five hundred more years pass and Merlin leaves Anna sleeping in their house somewhere in France, a small note on the bedside table telling her that he’d find her in the coming months; That he has to be alone for awhile but that he would absolutely find her again.  
-  
He goes back to the lake and sits, talks to it, asking for guidance.  
Only the breeze and the swaying of long-overgrown foliage answers him.  
He doesn’t know how long he sits, but eventually it’s too much for him.  
He throws himself up and throws himself down again on the shore of the dark lake – begging Freya to appear to him – to show him what to do.  
Silence answers him.  
-  
As he sits on the shore, still motionless and listening for something, anything, to be said; in his waiting he remembers the fisher king – the man waiting for the once and future kind to return.  
Was he destined the same fate?  
Was this some cruel ploy the gods had created for him, something to amuse themselves with?  
As they watched him wait, and wait, and wait, and beg and hurt – were they ever really going to return Arthut to him?  
No. He would not play the fool. Not any longer.  
-  
He returns to Annabeth not long afterwards, his chest grows tight when she yells at him – her face creased with weeks of worry.  
He pulls her close, placing a small kiss on her forehead and sighing into her hair.  
He would make things right.  
-  
He’s alone, not two hundred years later, in the belly of an abandoned citadel somewhere in the north of Ireland when he finds it.  
A tiny book, rotted and ripped, but filled with the most curious spell.  
When he finds it, he stares at the page. Reading it over, and over, and over again. It’s a spell to revive the dead, and turn back time.  
But the cost is great, the souls of every living thing from the present, backwards to the time of death.  
How many people had lived in the entire world in the past six, almost seven, hundred years?  
Millions? Billions?  
But not even a billion people could compare to Arthur.  
It’s black magic, and it would take a lot of power, but he knows – somewhere in his heart – that he’d be capable of it. The years had twisted him in a way he hadn’t realized. He thinks of Annabeth, of how important she’s become to him.  
How, no matter how his heart has always been focused on Arthur, she’s never left him.  
But she would still be there, she was conceived before Arthur’s death. One day, when this was all over, he would tell her the truth.  
He could have Arthur, and his best friend. It would be perfect.  
-  
At first she just stares at him, face blank with shock, and then screams at him.  
“This isn’t you, the Merlin I know would not do this. He wouldn’t even consider it.”  
But Arthur is more important, he always had been.  
She takes his face in her hands and pulls him close, crying and pulling at his hair.  
“It’s okay,” he whispers, “soon we’ll be home and you can grow up properly – with your father and mother. We will all be happy.”  
-  
He leaves her, once again, while she’s asleep.  
He leaves no note this time.  
-  
There is always a price with magic, he remembers (later, too late), it will always take the things you hold the most dear.  
-  
And after it’s done, he opens his eyes and Arthur is in his arms – eyes closed, like he remembered, but when Merlin leans in close and he can feel the soft breaths of air on his face he cries.  
He ignores the weight of the billions of lives weighing down on his shoulders.  
-  
When Arthur wakes a few hours later, completely healed, they walk into the forest and Merlin still remembers where the horses are from the first time. He longs to reach out and touch his King’s arm, his face, and tell him of the thousand lives he lived.  
He doesn’t.  
-  
Arthur leaps off of his horse, and pulls Gwen into his arms the moment he sees her. She starts to cry, Arthur’s face softens as he places small kisses along her cheek and face.  
They look at each other with such care, that Merlin suddenly feels sick.  
He’d almost forgotten – Arthur’s attention had always been for Gwen.  
Perhaps the years had twisted that, given him some sort of sick hope.  
He almost wanted to yell, to push Gwen into Leon’s arms and kiss Arthur himself.  
But no, none of that had ever happened. Gwen was still bound to Arthur, and him back to her – till death do they part.  
-  
The ban on magic is lifted, and Merlin is made court sorcerer.  
It’s everything he could have asked for.  
-  
Though he tries to smother it, he can’t help the hope in his heart as he waits – one month, then two months, and then three months….  
No one mentions anything about a princess.  
One night four months later he cries again, realizing that he’d made another mistake.  
-  
_Why couldn't he get anything right?_

**Author's Note:**

> If you don't like the angst you can always pretend Arthur and Gwen were waiting for Merlin to notice that Gwen was pregnant, excited for him to notice by himself? And a month after the story finishes Merlin does notice and he cries in relief. 
> 
> Anyways.... Hope you enjoyed it. This version I feel is a little cleaner than my last one, but I'm still as unsatisfied with the ending as I was the first time.


End file.
